'I am not sure about those. Probably merely smoke, screens, if I know
Taita. He is never one to make life too easy for us. Perhaps they do
have significance, but we can only hope to unravel them as we work
through the moves of our stones.'
Nicholas studied her figures a while, then grinned ruefully. 'Just think
how remote was the possibility that anybody would ever be able to
decipher the clues he left behind. The first requirement is that the
searcher must have access to both chronicles, the seventh scroll and the
stele of Tanus, before he had any chance of understanding the key to the
tomb.'
She laughed - a throaty, well'satisfied sound. 'Yes, he must have
believed that he was perfectly safe. Well, we will see now, MasteTTaita.
We will see just how clever you really were.' Then, sober and
businesslike once more, she looked up the stone staircase that led to
Taita's maze.
'Now we have to see if my figures and theories fit into the hard stones
and walls of Taita's architecture. But where do we start?'
'At the beginning,' Nicholas suggested, 'the god plays the first coup.
That's what Taita told us. If we start here in the shrine of Osiris, at
the foot of the staircase, then perhaps that will give us the alignment
of his imaginary bao board.'
'I had the same idea,' she agreed immediately. 'Let's postulate that
this is the north castle of Taita board. Then we work the protocol of
the four bulls from here.'
It was slow and painstaking work, trying to work their way into the mind
of the ancient scribe by probing the labyrinth of passages and tunnels
that he had built four thousand years previously. This time they moved
into the maze with more circumspection. Nicholas had filled his pockets
with lumps of dried white river clay, and he used these like a
schoolmaster's stick of chalk to write on the stone walls at each branch
and fork of the tunnels, setting out the notations from the winter face
of the, stele and marking a signpost to enable them not only to find
their way through the maze but to relate it to the model that Royan was
drawing up in her notebook.
They found that their first assumption that the shrine of Osiris was the
north castle of the board seemed to be correct, and they happily
believed that with this as the key it would be a simple matter to follow
the moves of play to their conclusion. But these hopes were soon dashed
as they realized that Taita was not thinking in the simple two
dimensions of the conventional board. He had added the third dimension
to the equation.
The stairway leading up from the shrine of Osiris was not the only link
between the eight landings. Each of the passages leading off from it was
subtly angled either upwards or downwards. As they followed the twists
and turns of one of these tunnels they did not detect the fact that they
were changing levels. Then suddenly they reemerged on to the central
staircase, but on a landing higher than the one they had entered from.
They stood there and stared at each other in horrified disbelief.
Royan spoke first. 'I didn't even have the feeling that we were
